Apple’s Jonathan Ive in UK to accept honor from Queen

The man credited for designing some of Apple’s most successful products will receive a knighthood from the Queen in his native UK on Wednesday.

Jonathan Ive, who heads the Cupertino company’s design team, will receive the honor for services to design and enterprise. He said he was both thrilled and humbled to be receiving it.

“I’m very aware of an incredible tradition in the UK of designing and making, and so to be recognized in this way is really wonderful,” Ive said this week in a wide-ranging interview with The Telegraph’s Shane Richmond.

Ive started working for Apple in 1992 and helped design groundbreaking products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Speaking about his team’s approach to design, Ive told Richmond, “We try to develop products that seem somehow inevitable. That leave you with the sense that that’s the only possible solution that makes sense.”

He continued :“Our products are tools and we don’t want design to get in the way. We’re trying to bring simplicity and clarity, we’re trying to order the products. I think subconsciously people are remarkably discerning. I think that they can sense care.”

Richmond notes that “simplicity” is one particular word that comes up again and again with Ive. “Our goal is to try to bring a calm and simplicity to what are incredibly complex problems so that you’re not aware really of the solution, you’re not aware of how hard the problem was that was eventually solved,” the Apple designer told him.

The 45-year-old Brit helped turn around Apple in the late 1990s with the design of the colorful iMac line of personal computers. Next up was the iPod, a digital music player that changed forever the way we listen to and manage our music. The iPhone and iPad, also designed by Ive and his team, have sold in their millions and left other tech companies playing catch-up.

When asked which product he’d most like to be remembered for, Ive answers in true Apple fashion. “It’s a really tough one. A lot does seem to come back to the fact that what we’re working on now feels like the most important and the best work we’ve done, and so it would be what we’re working on right now, which of course I can’t tell you about.”

Whether he’s referring to the much talked about Apple TV or the next iPhone – or something else entirely – we’ll just have to do what we always have to do with upcoming Apple products. Wait and see.